Mike Argento: And the chair responds ...

NEWS ITEM: "Eastwooding," the act of lecturing an empty chair, born when actor/director Clint Eastwood delivered a rambling address to an empty chair at the Republican National Convention, has become the latest meme to take over the Internet, with hundreds of people posting photos of themselves talking to empty chairs.

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I was just sitting there minding my own business. Seriously, I wasn't doing anything, not bothering anybody. Just waiting for someone to come along and sit on me. That's what I do. I'm a chair.

You think it's easy? It's not. Sure, I'm an inanimate object, but that doesn't mean I don't have hopes and dreams. It doesn't mean that I don't want to be useful, that I want to serve my purpose, that I exist to give you somewhere to sit.

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It's not a big deal, really. I don't ask for any special treatment, only that you understand my limits. I mean, fear strikes my heart just thinking about New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie.

I have feelings too. Take, for instance, the movies, when someone breaks a chair over a bad guy's head. You always get a charge out of that. But won't someone think of the chair?

Nobody ever thinks of the chair.

So there I was, keeping to myself, when I found myself being dragged to center stage and some old guy starts rambling at me. I know who the old guy is. It was that guy from the movies, Dirty Harry. I like him. He's made some good movies, like that one where he sits on his porch and drinks beer while watching his Hmong neighbors. That chair had it good. Just had to be there on the porch. Nicely lit. Looked good. Clint didn't try to talk to it.

Sure, he's abused chairs before. I think he might have broken a chair over someone's head in some movie, "Dirty Harry" - or maybe it was "The Outlaw Josie Wales." You know how I feel about that.

But this, let me tell you, I didn't expect this.

To be honest, I wasn't sure what he was talking about most of the time. He seemed to be kind of rambling, going off about Gitmo and how much money we spent on it and whatnot. I had no idea where that was going.

He got a lot of attention when he said, "What do you mean shut up?"

Of course I told him to shut up. I didn't mean anything by it. I thought I was helping the guy out. I knew how this was going to end and it wouldn't be good. He'd wind up looking like some cranky old man yelling at a chair. That's not good. That's not what people expect from The Man With No Name.

That guy, The Man With No Name, he was cool. He knew enough not to go off on rambling monologues directed at chairs. That guy, he went through an entire movie and probably spoke about eight words total. And none of them were directed toward a chair.

And now, here he is lecturing me, a chair, about Afghanistan and the Russians and whatever. It was a kind of sad.

I really had no response. I'm a chair. What am I going to say?

And for the record, when he said, "OK, well anyway. All right, I'm sorry. I can't do that to myself either," all I said is, "Why don't you have a seat and a drink of water and collect your thoughts because you seem to be off the rails here." I can't help it if he was offended.

See, I did try to help the guy out. But he wouldn't listen. He just kept going on about Joe Biden and airplanes and some stuff that I had no idea what he was talking about. He said I was a lawyer. I'm not a lawyer. I'm a chair. But he kept going on about how he doesn't like lawyers, or something like that. I kept trying to tell him that his guy, whatshisname, Mitt, has a law degree. But he wouldn't listen. He just kept going on and on.

The whole time, I was thinking: Just shut up.

It wasn't because I was offended by him. He was the Outlaw Josie Wales, for goodness sake. He's a respected artist and a smart guy. He has Oscars. And I just knew that the moment he finished, he would be the butt of thousands of jokes, that he would wind up as a punchline for Leno and Letterman and Stewart and Colbert. I knew where this was going. He'd be all over Twitter and Pinterest and YouTube and all of those deals. People would be making fun of him.

But he didn't see it.

Maybe he has a blind spot. I should have known. After all, he did make a couple of movies with an orangutan. I know, it was the'70s, and a lot of people did stupid stuff in that stupid decade. But still, an orangutan? What was he thinking?

Obviously, he wasn't.

And when he started lecturing me, he went to that same place, that little corner of the brain where ego overrides self-awareness, and to a lot of people, you wind up making a fool out of yourself.

But what do I know?

I'm a chair.

Mike Argento's column appears Mondays and Fridays in Living and Sundays in Viewpoints. Reach him at mike@ydr.com or 771-2046. Read more Argento columns at www.ydr.com/mike. Or follow him on Twitter at FnMikeArgento.